Making America Great … Again and Again

Just exactly when was it that America was great? What were the salient characteristics of those times, and to what would we be returning? Was it when …

The U.S. Constitution counted ‘Negroes’ as three-fifths of a person for census purposes and congressional apportionment, and entirely as non-persons where civil and human rights were concerned? (18th & 19th c.)

The principal occupation of the United States Army was extermination of native American tribes and their culture? (19th c.)

American industrial workers were required to work 12-hours shifts six days a week in dangerous, unhealthy and environmentally-destructive sweatshops? (19th c. to 20th c. ‘teens & ’20s)

American workers were gunned down in the streets by police and militia when they went on strike against intolerable working conditions? (see above)

Collusive networks of market arbitragers and speculators could regularly loot the nation’s financial system (with near-total impunity) by orchestrating increasingly complex pump-and-dump asset-inflation schemes that found hordes of newborn suckers every minute? (19th c. to present)

The country’s principal financiers and industrialists (Henry Ford, Walter Teague, John D. Rockefeller, Sosthenes Behn, William Davis, etc.) publicly extolled the ideology and civic virtues of Nazi Germany while they made billions of dollars in profits by helping to build up Hitler’s armament industry? (1930’s)

The ‘Greatest Generation’ rounded up American citizens of Asian ancestry as enemy aliens, confiscated their property and imprisoned them in remote desert compounds? While at the same time combatant prisoners-of-war from German and Italian armies “interned” in the southern United States were given a monthly stipend and weekend furloughs in smalltown America? (mid-20th c.)

Police and espionage services spied on, imprisoned, and sometimes killed their fellow Americans on the grounds that they were suspected of ‘subversive’ political opinions? (early 20th c. to present)

As an instrument of foreign policy, United States diplomats and spies bribed foreign legislatures, rigged elections, organized civil unrest, encouraged coups d’etat, and carried out political assassinations in countries that did not sufficiently accommodate American commercial interests? (20th c. to present)

Such high standards to live up to. How could America possibly be as great as that once again?